Coffee marks my life. I had my first flat white by the lake in Zurich with my good friend Chloé who introduced me to the refined caffeinated drink. Ever since, I have been ordering it across the globe in an attempt to come off as a fancy coffee connaisseur. I love the reaction on the local Brooklyn Barrista’s face when I ask if they have a flat white and he freezes before the manager tells him “it’s just a fancy way of saying latte, charge him for that”. I am currently sitting in another one of those hipster coffee shops trying to be productive on a post partying Saturday morning and I can’t seem to take my eyes off the foam on top of the mug. I am usually quite expressive yet today I cannot help but notice how toned down my thoughts are, how steady my heartbeat is. It seems my mood became immune to caffeine.
In psychiatry we talk about the range of one's mood and affect i.e. the extent through which someone can travel from the lowest to the highest point of the human emotional ladder during a psychiatric interview. The thing about those of us who travel all the way up and down that ladder, is that it is far easier to lose the handle and overshoot. You could argue that it would be easier to keep your emotions under control and to rationally release the appropriate doses to every situation. That approach may be the right decision. However as Milan Kundera puts it, the unbearable truth about human life is its lightness whereby no decision can really ever be known to be right or wrong. We only have one life and we can never know what would have happened had we chosen the other road. Things are as they are for no reason other than absurdity. This creates anxiety focused on figuring out where our life will take us or whether it could have been better. Faced by that fact, you either embrace the lightness and thus keep jumping from one adventure to the next or you stagnate in heaviness, fixating on a choice versus the other. I always identified as being heavy, as insisting on dogmatic approaches to what life should be like, to what love is and to what is expected of me in life. Moving to New York has pushed me to reconsider my heaviness, to let go of my need for answers and to embrace that life is uncontrollable, that pain takes too long sometimes to subside, that no calendar can decide when your heart heals or when you are ok to love again. No formula decides when the lonely New York street will feel like home. The only control you have in this life is over your actions, and that only comes with much, much work, will power and time. There are very few cities that offer you so many opportunities to focus on yourself like New York does. No other place pushes you to overcome your fears and insecurities to become part of its population and be dubbed a New Yorker. I have been single my whole life and it has never bothered me to be honest. I did however always belong rigorously to Large social circles which met my need for human connection. Yet I always enjoyed my absolute freedom and lack of entanglement that came from being in so many groups. However when I first moved here I found myself clinging to ghosts from my past, building safety nets very deep in the sand of the Atlantic shore and stretching them all the way back to the middle east in relations doomed to fail before they even start. The fear of "killing" old friends and lovers has rendered it impossible for me to cut those cords and suspended me for a few month on a transatlantic thread that was slowly burning over the fire of distance-induced apathy.
This will sound like an oxymoron yet one of the major lessons I am learning in NYC is to slow down. I am notorious for being neurotic and occasionally impulsive. I am emotional and rarely rational and often attempt to control the world. Yet when the world moves from being a bunch of coffeeshops and bars aligning a vibrant street called Hamra (Red) to becoming 8 million people from all over the globe, it becomes much harder to control. This is where I learn to breathe, to let go of others because I am not here to save or attach to anyone, I am here to do Yoga, embrace clubbing and figure out who I want to be in my 30s.
I go back to my cup of flat white now, never mind that exaggerated reflective moment, the world is here, coffee is the moment and life is happening.
In psychiatry we talk about the range of one's mood and affect i.e. the extent through which someone can travel from the lowest to the highest point of the human emotional ladder during a psychiatric interview. The thing about those of us who travel all the way up and down that ladder, is that it is far easier to lose the handle and overshoot. You could argue that it would be easier to keep your emotions under control and to rationally release the appropriate doses to every situation. That approach may be the right decision. However as Milan Kundera puts it, the unbearable truth about human life is its lightness whereby no decision can really ever be known to be right or wrong. We only have one life and we can never know what would have happened had we chosen the other road. Things are as they are for no reason other than absurdity. This creates anxiety focused on figuring out where our life will take us or whether it could have been better. Faced by that fact, you either embrace the lightness and thus keep jumping from one adventure to the next or you stagnate in heaviness, fixating on a choice versus the other. I always identified as being heavy, as insisting on dogmatic approaches to what life should be like, to what love is and to what is expected of me in life. Moving to New York has pushed me to reconsider my heaviness, to let go of my need for answers and to embrace that life is uncontrollable, that pain takes too long sometimes to subside, that no calendar can decide when your heart heals or when you are ok to love again. No formula decides when the lonely New York street will feel like home. The only control you have in this life is over your actions, and that only comes with much, much work, will power and time. There are very few cities that offer you so many opportunities to focus on yourself like New York does. No other place pushes you to overcome your fears and insecurities to become part of its population and be dubbed a New Yorker. I have been single my whole life and it has never bothered me to be honest. I did however always belong rigorously to Large social circles which met my need for human connection. Yet I always enjoyed my absolute freedom and lack of entanglement that came from being in so many groups. However when I first moved here I found myself clinging to ghosts from my past, building safety nets very deep in the sand of the Atlantic shore and stretching them all the way back to the middle east in relations doomed to fail before they even start. The fear of "killing" old friends and lovers has rendered it impossible for me to cut those cords and suspended me for a few month on a transatlantic thread that was slowly burning over the fire of distance-induced apathy.
This will sound like an oxymoron yet one of the major lessons I am learning in NYC is to slow down. I am notorious for being neurotic and occasionally impulsive. I am emotional and rarely rational and often attempt to control the world. Yet when the world moves from being a bunch of coffeeshops and bars aligning a vibrant street called Hamra (Red) to becoming 8 million people from all over the globe, it becomes much harder to control. This is where I learn to breathe, to let go of others because I am not here to save or attach to anyone, I am here to do Yoga, embrace clubbing and figure out who I want to be in my 30s.
I go back to my cup of flat white now, never mind that exaggerated reflective moment, the world is here, coffee is the moment and life is happening.
Pretty wild and colorful thoughts considering you were staring at a "flat white"
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